Tag Archives: internet

Us Internet elite (oh how, I wish) have been using Twitter for a few years now.

I follow my favorite bands, celebrities, TV shows, comic writers, the a fore mentioned Internet elite (love you guys) and a few people I know from internet or IRL.

I’ll never have 100,000’s of followers and that’s fine really. Besides everyone knows it’s just a popularity contest that makes the ones from High School pale in comparison. God… if you told me twenty years ago I’d be pining for High School again I would have punched you in the face.

The idea behind Twitter (and all social media) is that if it’s done right it’s granular, organic and most of all there is transparency. You have personal investment in the other party and they in you. Like the kids say keen’ it real.

That’s why getting continually getting followed by people, organizations, companies and social media experts (they don’t get their own category so much as a special level of hell when I get a blind follow) gets me down. There’s three kinds of follows I hate a) I’ve never heard of them, b) are not relevant to me in any shape or form or c) have no idea how they even found me in the millions out there. That’s why I fell dirty knowing that they are only looking for a knee jerk follow back to bost their numb. Let me tell you this isn’t MySpace and I’m not going to thank you “for the add” with some god awful animated gif of a [add cute animal name here] doing [add some adorable act here].

There’s nothing worse than when someone blindly follows.

Thankfully, Twitter can lead to funny internet videos that only the cool kids understand…. but for how long.

If Moses had access to Facebook one of the plagues upon Eygpt would have most assuredly have been application notices in your news feed.

I made the off hand status update of blocking Facebook applications (200 and counting) the other day and understandably some people were wondering how such a feat was accomplished. What I think most people do is just (myself in the past) have just unfriended (it's a real word) people to cut out the spaming of news feeds. Remeber block applications not friends.

Maybe we will see some innovation here on our beloved VOX .When VOX launched, it's feature set was pretty good and better than anything else I had found. Unfortunatley, it's getting long in the tooth two years on.

You can still only import video from YouTube (where is the support for all the other video sites?). Yes you can embed them but it is not as elegant. Plus it doesn't show up in your video libaray.

There hasn't been any update to the upload tool for mulitpul photos, but to be fair it does do the job adaqually.

Still waiting for a native application for the iPhone. I would certainly blog more if there was one. I'd even gladly pay for such an application.

Though I haven't seen it in a while, the dreaded white screen of nothing was pretty prevelent here on VOX in the past.

I really look forward to the [this is good] sections but sometimes there are really slow in updating. I'd recommend adding the editors to your neighborhood. News & Politics, Music, Life, Entertainment, Culture & Technology. When you find interesting stuff hit the share button (that's on every post) and send on to one of the editors.

These are really just annoyances, it's the community here on VOX that makes me stay. But it would be nice to see some of them addressed and maybe see some new features roll out.

I'm really hoping that the former Pownce team is the influx of new blood that VOX needs to get me excited about posting here again. Also if they could make it as easy as posting to Pownce or Twitter I would certainly post more, way more.

For anyone who has spent anytime at all on the internet we're all familiar with the basic emoticons; the smiley :-), and wink 😉 and the tongue one :-P.

Okay as you can tell I'm less than proficient in the emoticon department but not for long with computer-ease.com's extensive emoticon legend.

And when I say extensive, I mean extensive. The emoticons are broken down into categories such as positive, negative, animals & creatures and a host of others. It's even further broken down by IM clients like Yahoo, MSN and AIM to name afew.

If everyone had access to this excellent reference there would be considerabley less typing on the internet.

I Twittered this week about Encyclopedia Britannica opening up the walled garden to web publishers for free and whether or not I qualified. Now either the barrier to entry is pretty low or my blog is much better than I thought because I'm in!

If you were wondering here's my take on this. Britannica even with a 237 year lead on competitors like Wikipedia, is not the first stop when you need some annotated reference material online. I'm sure that "kids today" are perfectly happy checking out Wikipedia and Britannica must certainly be worried about losing market share if not branding.

So what better way to increase your online presence than open up your service to web publishers (such as myself) that will start referencing you in their blog posts (like this one).

With Wikipedia's recent and on going shenanigans at the hands of founder Jimmy Wales, the online community certainly has not been against discussing the possibility that the collaborative online encyclopedia might be broken. Britannica might be able to get some traction here.

But Britannica has some work ahead to usurp Wikipedia as the webs first stop for all knowledge. Though Wikipedia has many omissions and contains much that is apocryphal, or at least wildly inaccurate it, scores over the older, more pedestrian work in two important respects. First, it is slightly cheaper; and secondly it has the words Don't Panic inscribed in large friendly letters on its cover.

Britannica does offer up widgets (but they do get a little cropped here on VOX) if you add it to your sidebar) on different subjects that you can embed on your site and even has a twitter feed you can follow. So if you have a site or blog and publish regularly why don't you see if you qualify for a free subscription.

Living in Canada sometimes you just go without the luxuries our neighbours to the south enjoy. No, not Mexico the other one.

Over the years names like Old Navy, Starbucks, Taco Bell and Best Buy have made their way north. And we have rejoiced. Well except Taco Bell, that stuff goes right through me.

But with the good must come the bad (like Taco Bell). It's called traffic shaping. Internet Service Providers (ISP), like Rogers & Bell (well that's pretty much it I'm afraid) are deciding what has priority on their network and degrading your service that you have payed for.

Amber Mac – Net Neutrality in Canada

ISPs say that demand for network bandwidth is out stripping supply, but instead of building out their networks and upgrading service (which they should be doing anyway) they have decided to throttle the internet.

In my opinion the ISPs have painted themselves into a corner by promising customers a certain (high) speed that they can no longer guarantee if everyone actually uses the service at the same time. Here are some examples for perspective. Imagine the electric company downgrading your service during peak hours for fears of brown outs. Or if your city ran out of water in the morning because everyone was having a shower before work. What if your phone only worked sometimes due to lack of lines? There would be huge outrage right? People would demand the level of service that they are paying for and these utilities would be held accountable.

The truth is ISPs don't throttle or pack shape to safe guard the integrity of their networks. They don't want you downloading content because they offer television or downloadable services themselves and you'd be cutting into their margins.